Excuse my silence on the blog for the past couple of months. Life has been strange since the solar eclipse. Around that time, I caught up with a healer friend I'd been out of touch with for a couple of years. Long story short, she recommended that I study the work of Neville Goddard and forwarded me some of his lectures.

His name sounded familiar, and as it turned out, I had his book, Feeling is the Secret, on my reading list for over two years. The title had intrigued me, but since I'd already read so many books on manifesting from his New Thought contemporaries—Napolean Hill, Joseph Murphy, Florence Scovel Shinn, Robert A. Russell, and more—I wasn't in a rush to read it since I assumed it would contain similar information.

I was wrong. Neville's work goes much deeper. Admittedly, I experienced an existential crisis since discovering his teachings, and I'm only coming out of it now. It's why I've been away, studying to understand how Neville's teachings fit in with the spiritual wisdom I've been exposed to so far.

Neville Goddard was a prominent spiritual teacher and author, active primarily from the 1930s to the 1970s. His books are in the public domain and free to access online. You can find anthologies of his books from self-publishers, although the anthology I recommend is from an imprint of Penguin if you want to avoid amateur formatting and spelling errors. Many of Neville's lectures are on YouTube.

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After the conversation with my healer friend, I texted one of my best friends who is very into manifesting, casually mentioning Neville Goddard. Before I even looked into his work, she immediately downloaded one of his books from the Libby library app and started reading. No less than two hours later, she texted me how The Awakened Imagination was blowing her mind.

"Interesting — his teacher Abdullah is Ethiopian", she noted, because she is Ethiopian. Then a follow up:

"Neville Lancelot Goddard was born in St. Andrew, Barbados, on 19 February 1905 ???????????"

I was incredulous because February 19 is my birthday. I had to Google him myself now.

"WTF," I wrote back. "Wikipedia says Abdullah introduced Neville to Kabbalah and taught him Hebrew???????"

Abdullah was a rabbi. Kabbalah interprets the Bible, and Neville is known for his interpretations of the Bible. My friend had started taking Kabbalah classes seven months ago on my recommendation. I actually think she's more into Kabbalah than I am right now.

These synchronicities were too crazy to ignore. I am Chinese (yes, born and raised), and later I learned there is even a Chinese connection between Neville and his enigmatic teacher. In his lecture "A Lesson In Scripture," a transcript of which is published in the book Infinite Potential, Neville mentioned first meeting Abdullah in 1931 at one of his lectures in New York.

Neville says: "When Ab called me by name I said: 'I don't know you,' and he replied: 'Oh yes you do, but you have forgotten. We were together in China thousands of years ago, but you promised to completely forget in order to play the part you must play now."

Neville goes on to recount a letter he received from a student years later when he became a teacher himself. She wrote of having a psychic insight of him as an ancient Chinese philosopher when she attended one of his lectures. The vision wouldn't go away.

China, Ethiopia, Kabbalah, my birthday—all these coincidences were too hard to ignore. Leading up to all this, I'd been pulled in by my birthday from other sources. In March, I had been looking into going to Olivia Rodrigo's concert and Googled her opener, Chappell Roan. I already thought it was cool that Olivia's birthday is Feb 20, only a day after mine, so I was amazed to learn that Chappell Roan shared my exact birthday of Feb 19.

A week later, an episode of The Diary of a CEO, a podcast/YouTube channel I sometimes watch, came recommended on my feed. The guest was David Gandy and from how he described himself, I thought, for sure this guy is an Aquarius, because I recognize my people. I looked him up and not only is he an Aquarius, his birthday is also February 19! Oh, and I should mention that the birthday of my Ethiopian friend's most recent ex is... you guess it....February 19...

(Update: a friend from Kabbalah read this very post and gave me another piece of synchronicity: her ex-boyfriend's mother is Ethiopian and shares the birthday of February 19.)

"It's the algorithm pulling you in," my healer friend told me. The algorithm of life, of consciousness. To show me that Neville Goddard is someone I should be studying seriously. He is popular with the manifesting crowd, with some followers devoted to a cultish degree. However, I can't say how many of them go too deep with his work, or even want to.

Because if you manifest the Neville way and want to understand how it works, you basically have to believe in parallel universes/the multiverse (supported by science) and a version of simulation theory. That stuff gets trippy.

Neville states that creation is already finished. Our world is a dream we will one day wake up from. We play all the parts in the drama of life.

Life is a game. It can be fun when we understand we are the creators of our reality. I am responsible for everything in my world. You are responsible for your world. If we have to play, let's play to win.

I'll go deeper into these discoveries in future posts. For now, I want to keep studying, keep connecting the dots from various teachings. I should also read up on quantum physics. When I talk to people about all this, I sound crazy, but the deeper I go down the rabbit hole, the more life and its laws make sense.

It's an honor my friend and I have this special connection to Neville and Abdullah. Sometimes the 3D drags us down, and we don't feel so powerful. "You have to remember who you are," I tell her. And that goes for me as well.